It was our first session together.
He wanted to know how I could help him stop drinking. He wanted to feel better inside. About himself. He would do things that he didn’t like about himself.
He wondered if the behaviors that hurt his wife’s feelings and kept him feeling separate from his closest friends had something to do with how his father treated him when he was a boy. The abuse was verbal and physical.
I requested he wait to tell me the whole story. First I wanted to explain how the mind works and then, if he wanted, he could tell me the story.
“From what you’ve told me so far,” I said to this young father and husband,
“I know that there’s nothing wrong with your mind.
Everything you’ve said to me has been important and
has helped me understand how I can be of help to you.”
He looked at me with a feeling of relief in his eyes. He said, “Did you just say there’s nothing wrong with my mind?” His eyes began to tear up and his shoulders relaxed.
“Yes,” I said. “At the beginning of our meeting, I asked you to give me the most important details of why you came here today and you succinctly gave me the information I needed to understand and you made perfect sense to me. So I know there’s nothing wrong with your mind.”
The tears fell. He wept for a few minutes and finally looked up.
“I’ve never been told that there’s nothing wrong with my mind,” he said. “I didn’t know how much I needed to hear that. I’ve been thinking I’m crazy for a long time.”
And so began the transformation of how he once felt about himself.
As the session progressed, and when he fully understood that his mind was like a computer in that it categorizes information with “similar” material prioritized in terms of threat, it was beginning to dawn on him that his mind had been simply trying to protect him from threats that no longer existed.
His dad was nowhere nearby to hurt him. That time had come and gone. He’d already survived it. It was no longer something occurring and we would simply deactivate the emotional content so his deeper mind would understand:
- There’s no need for his subconscious mind to be processing those memories.
- It was time for that file that had been opened years before to be closed for good.
- To add that file to a folder that read, “Done. No longer reading this information.”
“May we do a short process to clear the material that your mind has been reading as active,” I asked, “so we can free up energy for what is most beneficial for you?
Of course, he said yes.
The process took less than 10 minutes and when we were done, I said, “So your father would get angry. He would say hurtful things to you and sometimes hurt your body too.”
“Yes, that happened,” he said.
“What do you notice now about those memories now?” Adding, “As you look back, see if you notice a change or shift,” I asked.
He looked up and over with his eyes as he searched for the memories. And something truly magical occurred.
He began to smile and more tears came to his eyes.
“None of that stuff matters,” he said. “That’s the first thing that popped into my mind. I don’t feel much, just more sorry for my dad that he was such a lonely man.”
“Yes, you are realizing that none of what dad was doing or how he was behaving had to do with you,” I added.
“I know that’s true now. I feel so hopeful and about a 500 pounds lighter too.”
Within those 2 hours we spent together, suddenly, and without having to re-live any painful memories, the magic of who he really is began to surface. The painful thread from his past as a young boy was put into its rightful place.
That is how the magic of who you really are shows up.
